Tether
by tastewithouttalent
Summary: "Sometimes, Byakuran forgets when he is." With universes of knowledge in his head, Byakuran is only ever undone by the fixed point.


Sometimes, Byakuran forgets when he is.

It's not often. Infinite universes or no, relationships and knowledge and conversations remain distinct, at least enough for him to tether himself to which timeline he's focused on. This is the nuclear apocalypse universe, this the one where he engineers an election that results in an excess of power in his own too-greedy hands. This is the one where he gains access to illegal weapons and pushes their development along at reckless speeds, this the alternate where he infiltrates a secure organization and overthrows them from the inside. Not all are pleasant endings - for all his knowledge of the future he can't always avoid a gunshot, or a burst of radiation, or an unlikely slip down a flight of stairs, in one remarkably mundane ending. But even then they are distinct, each past a separate strand in the tapestry of his knowledge that ties him down to the present, to the reality he chooses to be his own.

And yet. There are times, moments when his hold slips, when the texture of the threads goes slick and frictionless, when Byakuran's awareness of who he is and when he is and where he is blurs together into hazy heat. They are not pleasant experiences, at least in themselves; it's like being undone, as if that smooth weave is falling loose as its supports give way, all the pattern of Byakuran's efforts rendered useless by a single bright thread skipping out-of-place through the colors. Byakuran doesn't avoid these moments, makes no effort to sidestep the fallout when it comes; he knows better than to try to escape the inevitable, the sun-blindness that comes with his one fixed point.

So he lets it come. And come it does, with the heat of Irie's mouth against his or the hiss of Irie's breathing on his skin. Scarlet hair tangles around his fingers and Byakuran's timeline slides away, too many moments of this same experience overlapping into indistinguishable haze. Is this the first time they've touched, the fifth, the dozenth? Has he had the shiver of Irie's desperate skin under his hands fifty, ten, three times? Has it ever happened before, or is that gasp of air as virginal as it is thrilled, is the heat on Irie's skin panic as much as arousal? Byakuran doesn't know, can never remember; it feels sometimes like this is all he is, all he has ever been, these hands and these eyes and this smile, all his attention turned on Irie like a pin stuck through a butterfly, needle-sharp and inescapable.

He doesn't mind. Of all the things he has experienced, or at least remembers experiencing (and what's the difference between those two options, in the end), Irie is the best of it, the shape of his smile and the texture of his hair and the color of his eyes, the silky-smooth pale of the inside of his thighs and the quiver of his breathing and the catch of his voice when Byakuran shapes it into a moan. If Byakuran is to lose himself in the abyss of endless memories, he'd prefer to do it here, with the shadow of Irie's eyelashes against his cheek for company and the sound of his own name wrung into a plea and a promise at once. Byakuran can't place when they are - has the betrayal come? is there heartbreak behind Irie's tight-shut eyes? - but it doesn't matter, none of it matters when they are together. Byakuran shuts his eyes to the clarity of vision, presses his lips to hair the same red as that one bright thread, and when he breathes in it's submission in his lungs, surrender more thorough than Irie will ever know he has wrought. There is phantom tension at his throat, too narrow to be fingers and too faint to be real, and Byakuran smiles into scarlet hair as Irie's trembling body arches up to press against him, as familiar hands catch and cling to his shoulders. They may as well be tangled around with string, the same hallucinated weight cutting against his neck with the promise of a noose, a tether ultimately, inevitably fatal for one or the other of them.

Byakuran doesn't care. There's no point in mourning the future when Irie is the only time he can remember.


End file.
